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the shape my thoughts take
Some great sketches here!
Pierre Bonnard taught me how to like the shape my thoughts take. Well, actually I already liked the shapes my thoughts took (at least some of the time) even before I had ever heard of Bonnard but using the great old painter’s name lends a tincture of authority to the claims that follow. Or at least I think it does…. (Do others love Bonnard as much as I do?) Does the general public love this man who drew like someone who is talking to himself?
If you like the shapes your thoughts take or are willing to let thoughts take what shape they will, then drawing becomes a very different game. You can go deeper and deeper into a subject, despite “mistakes,” adding more and more visual information or
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Caprice Bar, Mykonos, Greece
Totally amazing structure!
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Van Gogh and the Postman
A wonderful painting and so full of feeling.
“I’m now working on the portrait of a postman with his dark blue uniform with yellow. A head something like that of Socrates, almost no nose, a high forehead, bald pate, small grey eyes, high coloured full cheeks, a big beard, pepper and salt, big ears.” Vincent van Gogh
READ FULL ESSAY: Christie’s
“While Roulin isn’t exactly old enough to be like a father to me,” Van Gogh described to Theo in April 1889, “all the same he has silent solemnities and tendernesses for me like an old soldier would have for a young one. Always—but without a word—a certain something that seems to mean: we don’t know what will happen to us tomorrow, but think of me in any event. And that does one good when it comes from a man who is neither embittered…
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I really liked his “The Glass Room” and enjoyed the film too. A very interesting writer.
Although I have a tempting pile of new Australian releases waiting for me, I’m continuing my holiday reading from the TBR, with an added reason to take up Simon Mawer’s Prague Spring from 2018, because I have just bought Ancestry, his most recent one — and I really should read what I already have first, right?
There’s a review at The Guardian which recounts how in 1975 Mawer was caught in an avalanche on the North Face of Ben Nevis and had to cling to an ice ledge for 22 hours. Whether this experience informed his ability to capture the suspense of existential moments I do not know, but while Prague Spring is not a cliffhanger, it becomes unputdownable as the pages move towards their inexorable conclusion.
It is history that makes the conclusion inexorable. Set in 1968 when Czechoslovakia enjoyed a brief taste of freedom under Dubček before…
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Sounds like a deeply significant and informative read.
A Jewish family sits together peacefully in their home. It is an ordinary night. After dinner. Mother, father, six children, the oldest still under ten years.
Suddenly, agents of the Inquisition are at the door, there to take away Edgardo, age six, claiming he was secretly baptized by one of the family servants, therefore a Christian, therefore in need of Christian parents. The panicked family try to stop this, to save their young son, but there is nothing they can do. The inquisitors take him away starting a year’s long legal battle that will end with the fall of the Papel States.
They never get their son back.
The year is 1858!!!
What shocked me about this story was the year it took place. I expected this to be a story about the middle ages, but 1858 is modern times. Post Enlightenment. Post Industrial Revolution.
Turns out this is not…
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Autoportrait Day 314~ Erica Deeman
A random survey of self-portraits created by women through the centuries
British (active in USA) interdisciplinary artist
Erica Deeman (born 1977)
3. Self Portrait #2, 2020 / Instax film / The Svane Family Foundation, San Francisco, CA
penwithlit 
